Nick Garner's Blog

Reddit Terminally Broken

In my work in Betfair, I have been involved in social media traffic generation. I.e. finding a great writer, getting them to do stuff users will find cool and interesting for 40 seconds. I have spent a lot of money on this and its been reasonably successful for us and the readers we have found over the last 8 months.

Without getting into too much detail here, we can’t do digg anymore because we have been banned…yes banned. And Reddit is now a no go zone.? And for no good reason. We stayed within the terms and conditions of their sites and we were out.

Recently a big wave of censorship? has kicked off on Reddit. To explain more, you should read a couple of very insightful posts on exactly whats going on.

Brent Csutoras

Unfortunately, that transparency and democracy didn?t last at Reddit, who has gone from being one of the most democratic sites, where users determined the quality of content shown on the front page, to a site that is heavily moderated, using a handful of people and algorithm layers to censor and remove content that in many cases has never even broken the Reddit TOS.

Search engine journal

As Brent Csutoras noted in a recent post, there have been a significant amount of people who have been leaving Digg and going to Reddit. The reason for these users moving to Reddit is because while Digg likes to say that they are all about their users, everyone knows that their moderators have a significant amount of control over the content that makes it to the front page (and their trend of having more control has continued to increase over time).
Unfortunately, it seems that my initial impression of Reddit may have been too good to be true.

Essentially they say that bad stuff is happening in Reddit and they explain how the power crazed loonies are infecting the site. I use strong language, since I’m very unhappy about this, both as a user and as a marketing person trying to give something to the community to get some prominence (A fair trade I think)

My point: These sites are fragile eco systems where small changes or vulnerabilities in the ‘system’ can distort the whole site. All it takes is a hard core of people who get a taste for power and wield it promiscuously to ruin a good thing. It happens in countries and governments and its happening here.

My assumptions: There isn’t much money around to run sites like Reddit since the onset of this recession. Ad revenue has tanked and so sites like these probably run in a loss, so they have to use fewer staff. This means less control, allowing for bad people to go off the rails. And on it goes.

The cost of building sites like these is relatively low, since there is now opensource software to quickly build a community,? so I expect the weight may well shift to community sites like sphinn.com which are more manageable in size and have a really passonate following who are very knowledgeable in their specialisation. A nice list of alternatives.

I know the only way you can fight this kind of corruption of quality, is to vote with your clicks and patronise other sites….but please, not Digg or Reddit.

I guess its Mixx for me!

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